During times of war, Americans instinctively look for two things: protection and truth. That is why it is so troubling when senior government officials stand at a podium, especially during wartime, and point at reporters and dismiss them as ‘fake news’ — especially when their statements could be taken as equating the American media with foreign enemies.
The Bulwark
A grainy video appears to show a line of blindfolded young girls parading past an underwear-clad Donald Trump. A girl’s anguished voice cries out in German. The video cuts to scenes of Trump and other famous figures talking with the late child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The Washington Post
A federal judge ruled Saturday that Kari Lake, President Donald Trump’s choice to lead the U.S. Agency for Global Media, did not have legal authority to take the actions she’s done to largely dismantle the Voice of America.
The Associated Press
Spanish-language radio has long been accused of being a conduit for conspiracies and falsehoods. In the past month alone, there have been outlandish claims ranging from Charlie Kirk’s assassination being linked to a $1.3 billion J.P. Morgan scandal to the baseless allegation that 300,000 children “disappeared” under the Biden administration.
WLRN Public Radio
In the days that followed the US and Israel’s joint military strike on Iran on Saturday, floods of images and videos that supposedly document the war have appeared online. Some are old or depict unrelated conflicts, are made or manipulated with AI.
The Verge
Minutes after Donald Trump announced that the US and Israeli governments had launched a “major combat operation” against Iran in the early hours of Saturday morning, disinformation about the attack and Tehran’s response flooded social platform X.
WIRED, BBC and The New York Times
Brady Tkachuk, the Ottawa Senators captain and a Team USA gold medalist, said he didn't appreciate the AI-doctored video released by the White House that made it appear he was disparaging Canadians.
ESPN Sports
What if the best defense against misinformation isn’t panic, but a punchline? Journalist and comedian Dave Jorgenson explores how misinformation has proliferated throughout history.
TED Talks
After Mexican forces killed the country's most wanted cartel leader on Sunday, false accounts of spectacular violence swept across social media, fueled by what researchers say was a coordinated propaganda campaign by organized crime.
Reuters and The Associated Press
A huge vaccination drive has been launched in the African nation of Malawi after the country’s first outbreak in years of the paralysing disease Polio. But the battle to wipe out the virus is struggling elsewhere because of a combination of factors that include misinformation. So how can it be eradicated?
The Guardian
Integrating news literacy instruction helps teach the critical thinking skills that our students need, not only to become better readers, but also to get them more invested in their learning. It’s an answer to that age-old question teachers hear from their students: ‘When am I ever going to use this in real life?’
USA Today
Some of the biggest players from Meta to TikTok are facing federal and state trials that seek to hold them responsible for harming children’s mental health. The lawsuits have come from school districts, local, state and the federal government as well as thousands of families.
The Associated Press
An Australian Senate committee is investigating how online bots and trolls, disinformation campaigns and tactics like "astroturfing" (fake grassroots campaigns) are delaying global action on climate change and renewable energy.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Information can be thought of as a basic brain nutrient, much like the lungs needing oxygen. Misinformation works to undo the brain’s operation at all levels of functioning, from the molecular to the microscopic to the behavioral.
Psychology Today
This week, President Trump called on his party to nationalize American elections, an unconstitutional move that he said would be justified because of the danger of noncitizens casting ballots. “These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally,” he said.
By Stephen Richer for The New York Times
As the Nancy Guthrie investigation enters its third week, details are still limited, but interest from around the country and the world remains high. The story has captured national and international attention, and misinformation from unverified sources about Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance remains rampant.
KOLD-TV Tucson
About a dozen times each day, medical staff at Parkside Pediatrics in Spartanburg, South Carolina, head to the clinic’s parking lot, reaching inside cars and minivans to check children and their parents for fever, rash and other signs of measles.
Reuters
Artificial intelligence tools are more likely to provide incorrect medical advice when the misinformation comes from what the software considers to be an authoritative source, a new study found.
Reuters
French authorities said they had detected a disinformation operation linked to the Russian Storm-1516 network that aimed to suggest that President Emmanuel Macron was implicated in the scandal surrounding sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Le Monde and AFP
Joe Pierre, M.D. has written Psych Unseen about the psychology of false beliefs for well over a decade. In 2016, just before Donald Trump’s first presidency, he wrote about the concept of ‘truthiness,’ defined by Webster’s dictionary as ‘truth coming from the gut, not books; the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts of facts known to be true.’
Psychology Today
